Conference steering group members believe it is essential New Zealand re-capture some of the Hillary goal-setting spirit if it is to arrest its economic slide.
Measures for the scorecard prepared for the Herald by McKinsey & Co have been under wide discussion.
The proposal has been canvassed with senior bureaucrats like Treasury Secretary Alan Bollard and Mary-Anne Thompson from the Prime Minister's Department. The thinking behind the annual measures has also been explored with Opposition players like National's Finance spokesman Bill English.
Contributing to the Herald's Common Core Debate in March, New Zealander Mary Quin lit fires when she proposed the scorecard could become an exciting annual event: "As a population with an instinct for competing and winning in sports, we will eagerly anticipate finding out how the team to which we all belong, Team New Zealand, is scoring against our own goals in the global game of nations".
Quin, a former vice-president of Xerox Corporation, said any shortfalls in achieving milestones should be used to generate healthy public debate.
Two strong arguments can be mounted for the National Scorecard:
Firstly, aspirational targets are necessary to facilitate change;
Secondly, transparent targets place a much needed discipline on the executive.
In a theme paper for tomorrow's workshop session on Sustainable Economic Strategies, Auckland University's Jason Ingham says the country will need to adopt readily measurable performance parameters, and commit itself to meeting prescribed targets if the transformation required to craft New Zealand's vision of tomorrow is to take place.
The five performance measures the Herald puts forward today are:
GROWTH ECONOMY
This is the 'big hairy audacious goal' at which the politicians balk.
If the Prime Minister's goal of getting NZ back into the top half of the OECD is to be achieved, it will require real GDP per capita growth of at least 6-7 per cent - there is simply no escaping it. Some estimates are nearer 8.
Even then the target rate is dependent on other OECD countries growing at their historical average rate of the 1970-1999 period, rather than improving their own performances, say Treasury economists Peter Mawson and Grant Scobie in Climbing the OECD Ladder: What does New Zealand have to do?
GDP per capita is a measure of the total flow of goods and services produced by a national economy. It does not capture the extent to which a nation's wealth is distributed among its people - a thorny problem for some left-wing politicians.
KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY
NZ's ranking as a knowledge-based player can be measured on several indices. The Technology Achievement Index presented in the Herald's National Scorecard, on which NZ ranks 15th, measures how well a country creates and uses technology and the building of human skills for use in the technological age.
It surveys 72 countries across eight key indicators: patents granted, royalty levels, internet hosts, proportion of high and medium technology exports, years of schooling, tertiary enrolment in maths, science and engineering, electricity consumption and the prevalence of telephone technology.
The top 10 are Finland, the US, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Britain, Canada, Australia and Singapore.
TALENT NATION
If New Zealanders want better overall earnings power and higher employment opportunities, more of us need to enrol at university or undertake vocational training.
New Zealand is placed 14th overall for participation in university education, and 5th overall for vocational education. But the 14th place ranking obscures a below average result: Only 13 per cent of New Zealanders go on to a university education - the United Stares scores double that.
Getting into the OECD's top 10 on this measure may not be a hard enough stretch target, but it is a start.
COHESIVE COMMUNITY
The United States is the wealthiest nation surveyed on a GDP per capita basis, but wealth alone does not buy it a place in the top five rankings on the United Nation's Human Development Index (HDI).
Adult literacy levels, education participation, life expectancy at birth, long-term unemployment rates and the standard of living based on purchasing power parity feature highly in this index.
In this year's report, New Zealand is ranked at 19 among the 62 nations that are surveyed. Norway tops the Index followed by Australia (2), Canada (3), Sweden (4) and Belgium (5).
High education and literacy levels play a large part in Norway's top ranking. Only eight per cent of Norwegians aged between 16-65 during the 1994-98 period lacked functional literacy skills compared to 18.2 per cent of New Zealanders.
HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT
Pure New Zealand is a great branding slogan, but NZ will have to focus on how it reduces its waste and consumption pressures if it wants to improve its 6th place ranking on the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI).
This new index ranks 122 countries across five general areas including environmental systems, reducing environmental stresses, reducing human vulnerability, social and institutional capacity and global stewardship. The top five are: Finland, Norway, Canada, Sweden and Switzerland.
These are not the only indexes on which New Zealand is judged.
New Zealand still rates fourth on the Heritage Foundation's economic freedom index, a tribute to the legacy of the economic deregulation era. Low protection levels, a low level of Government intervention in the economy, low inflation, low barriers to capital flows and foreign investment, and an emphasis on property rights have partially offset Labour's reintroduction of higher personal tax rates, a more restrictive labour regime and higher Government spending.
But our global competitiveness ranking has stalemated at 20th on the World Economic Forum's measures.
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